O’Brien, following the lead of her boss, Jonathan Klein, also believes that crack is used by Harlem parents, exclusively, this comment following a report indicating soaring use of cocaine and crack among white students while that among black youth has leveled off. This is one of the frequent hoaxes that the media creates at the expense of blacks, like the yarn about how black voters passed Proposition 8, the measure that denied same-sex marriage to gay and lesbian couples, or the one about how affirmative action benefited blacks, exclusively. Hollywood and the media have found huge profits in promoting negative stereotypes and hoaxes about black Americans.
(What the black critics of Moynihan missed at the time was that the majority of white women on welfare were probably Celtic, members of his tribe, but in a shameless act of self-promotion he figured rightly that he would be more successful joining the Nixon administration by dumping on blacks, the route to power and wealth used by a number of individuals and groups.) Remember the “crack baby epidemic,” a rumor begun by Charles Krauthammer? A hoax.
Ronald Reagan’s welfare queen? A hoax. Affirmative action as benefiting blacks, exclusively? A hoax. Widespread mayhem and rioting after hurricane Katrina and the murder and rape of a seven year old? A hoax perpetrated by CNN who eventually fired the black correspondent responsible for the rumor after he made up stories while assigned to cover the entire African continent. Widespread rioting reported in Oakland after the shooting of Oscar Grant, one of forty-seven unarmed black men shot by Oakland police in recent years, a hoax perpetrated by Jesse McKinley, The New York Times’s invisible West Coast correspondent. The list is long.
The man who could be called the founder of the American mass media, P.T. Barnum, was a slave owner and a master of the hoax. He made money from exhibiting a black woman, Joice Heth, who claimed that she, after Barnum gave her some shots of whiskey, was 161 and nursed George Washington. When she died her autopsy fascinated readers and gave them something about black life to gawk at. Barnum even charged admission to those who wanted to witness this grisly undertaking. It was the O.J. story of the time and like the contemporary media have made millions from O.J. (his trial saved CNN), the penny press and its readers just couldn’t let this autopsy story go.
I began a novel about the O.J. phenomenon in 1994, and what I’ve noticed is that O.J. is dragged into stories that have little to do with the ex-football player and even President Obama was joined at the hip with O.J.
Barnum and James Gordon Bennett’s Herald, among the first of the penny presses, which debuted in 1835, made cash from Joice Heth’s story but I doubt whether they were as blatant about their aims as CNN’s Jonathan Klein who, according to The New York Observer, told Rick Sanchez, their right-wing Hispanic token, that money could be made from the race issue. Black In America, which was meant to make whites feel superior and humiliate blacks by proxy, made so much money that P.T. Barnum’s heir, Jonathan Klein, says he’s going to do another one in July 2009. People, whose interpretation of movies like The Crash and David Simon’s black products differ from mine, say, well, Ishmael, you have to agree that these products, no matter how ugly and cynical and racist, give black actors jobs. So did The Birth of a Nation. But at least the actors performing in these venues get paid. The black panelists who are brought on to dignify town halls like Black In America, produced on the cheap, do it for free. They do talk shows where commentators have to fill sometimes three hours at a time. This costs less than some real investigation or in-depth interviews. Whatever you might say about the BBC, you do get African leaders talking for themselves instead of a stateside classroom person posing as an expert.
The blacks on cable are either conservative or passive or both. Joe Watkins, a MSNBC regular, and Amy Holmes, a Zambia-born right-winger, even defended Cheney’s use of torture.
Therefore, I was really taken aback when Carlos Watson, the kind of mellow fellow who won’t get angry (while Scarborough and Buchanan can throw fits whenever they wish) challenged Joe Scarborough’s comment that the Obama stimulus plan was “a stinking pile of garbage” and charged that he and Limbaugh had gotten the Republicans to vote against the package. (On October 29, 2009, it was reported that the stimulus had created three hundred eighty thousand jobs.) Scarborough went apoplectic on the guy. Yelling. Screaming. And so I turned on the Morning Joe at 6:30 a.m. (Oakland time) the day of the inaugural and, you guessed it, I found Mark Whitaker, Washington Bureau Chief and Senior Vice President, NBC News, and the first African-American top editor of a national newsmagazine use the sales pitch that dates back to the 1830s. He was asking two panelists and a Scarborough host whether Obama should go into the ghettoes and get the savages to behave better. He didn’t say it that way. That’s my putting words into his mouth. The moral-superiority-of-whites sales pitch has become subtler. He asked whether the new president should go into neighborhoods like mine and preach personal responsibility. We’re like the unruly blacks who were always getting into trouble in the movie Cadillac Records. We need a white savior like Chess Records owner Leonard Chess to bail us out of our screwed up “dysfunctional” lives. The White Man’s Burden.
The two panelists to whom he directed the question included a former general who tried to cover up the massacre of Vietnamese civilians (and who lent his name and reputation to an enterprise) and the invasion of a country that posed no threat to the United States. The invasion has resulted in the murder of thousands of civilians and army personnel. The other panelist was a convicted plagiarist. The host had to resign from Congress abruptly because of a scandal in his personal life. Surely persons that my inner-city neighbors should look up to for moral guidance!
Over the last year, while there have been purges, buyouts, firings, of distinguished African-American journalists, even the women at National Public Radio who were hired to replace black men, who made their target audience uncomfortable, the black right-wing sock puppets have been kept on. They can always be summoned to engage in a finger wagging session aimed at black America. President Obama found it necessary to use this tactic when he did his Father’s Day speech in which he scolded black fathers for their wayfaring ways, and Jesse Jackson got into trouble for accusing him of “talking down to black people.” Obama was congratulated by some himbos who got their jobs the way the bimbos got theirs. Many find them pleasant to look at, but none of them has the kind of intellectual curiosity that is required of great journalists. They’re there to entertain. The women to reveal their knees. The kind of media people who thought the entrapment of Marion Barry was funny until Sam Donaldson let it slip that some of them were doing coke themselves.
Some of them are divorcees and have personal lives that are in shreds but there they were congratulating Obama for what they deemed his Sister Souljah moment. They also liked his race speech in which he sympathized with the resentment of Reagan Democrats for what the commentators said was their feeling that blacks were getting more of a lift from social programs than they. Considering that whites were receiving land subsidies when Indians were being driven from their lands and blacks were in chains, were receivers of the major benefits from federal housing programs (which discriminated against blacks), the FDR programs, the Great Society programs, federal highway subsidies, the G.I. Bill which relocated them from the cities to the suburbs, I’m wondering what on earth President Obama was talking about. What is the basis for this resentment?